Another Done Dissertation is a Good Dissertation

I'm not the only person with a newly done dissertation. My friend Christine finished hers and defended beautifully to a whole roomful of people the first week of class (I'm not sure whether that full roomful was due to the time of the semester, to her being in Communication instead of Art History, or just to her personal magnetism... we'll say the last was a key factor). Christine even has a book contract already. But neither Christine's dissertation nor mine are online yet as the university moves slowly on that and Proquest moves even more slowly.
Danah Boyd, whose blog posts I sometimes note, has also just finished and as her dissertation is on social networking, it is hardly surprising that it is already online. Check it out and learn all you ever wanted to know about teenagers and social networking sites. I think the next topic to be dealt with is how the rest of us use these sites, a thing that has been intriguing me of late (when avoiding actual work and importunate rabbits).

Delicious Revamps

This morning when I attempted to add a Delicious tag, I had to log in. I almost never have to log in, so I wondered what was going on.
It turns out that Delicious has revamped its functions somewhat. I haven't had a lot of time to investigate, but the main thing that strikes me thus far is that, for those of us who try to bundle our tags, the new system isn't very friendly toward non-bundled tags. They just don't show up anywhere unless you go into the tag-bundling area. You have to go into a specific bundle to actually see all the tags you've ever used, and you have to tell it show you whether tags are used in other bundles.
I do often put a tag in more than one bundle, but I am most concerned to get the tags into at least one, because formerly the unbundled tags were all down at the bottom of the page and I had to scroll down to find them. Now it's even more vital to get them into bundles, because they just aren't anywhere to be seen under normal circumstances.
This is irksome, because while I do go in every few months and update the bundles, even when I've just done it, there are quite a few tags that just don't have a bundle. What am I to do with the tag "friends" for instance? Stick it in the "Practical" bundle? That seems a bit weird. "Fun"? Kind of limited. What about "hypnotism," "looting," "interviews," and "contests"?
Furthermore, certain tags show up as unbundled until you go to the bundle they belong in, with the intent of adding them, only to discover that they really are already there. I am not happy about that.
It looks like the display for tagged sites might be better than before, but I didn't really have a strong opinion on it previously, and I'm not sure I have a strong opinion on it yet now.
We will have to see how this all goes.

Ideas from the Blackboard Class

We completed our Blackboard/Courseweb training on Thursday afternoon, and I'm sure everyone was glad to get out of the basement of Alumni Hall and away from the surprisingly glary fluorescent lights. I'm not sure how the CIDDE people survive in this environment, although admittedly it doesn't bother me when I go over there to spend a couple of hours with the Digital Sender.
While at times it was tedious, I think we all learned a lot and were impressed with the instructors. Part of what a person gets out of this kind of class is an awareness of what can be done and that there are several ways of doing some of these things. The details can always be looked up in the manual later.
A nice bonus was that each person met individually with someone to discuss how best to arrange specific courses on Blackboard. The Intro to Modern and American Art courses I'll be teaching in the fall are relatively similar in style--both are introductory lecture courses that rely heavily on Powerpoint presentations of the works of art--but we decided that since Intro to Modern (in this iteration) is a once-a-week course (last time I taught it, it met three times a week!), the materials could be divided by week, whereas since American Art is twice a week and divided into units, the materials would be posted by unit rather than week. This would matter more if I had more online readings for American Art, but as it happens, most of the supplemental readings are in two anthologies that will be available at the bookstore.
The Blackboard training definitely gave me some new ideas. Last time I used Blackboard, I didn't use the grading function. Now that I know how it works, I will. More excitingly, there are possibilities for more effective teaching.
Both of these courses (neither being a large lecture) will have the students divide into two groups and each group present readings to the other group. In the past, the groups discussed their readings briefly in class before presenting. This took up class time and I had only a general idea which people were contributing more to the discussion. Blackboard offers online discussion groups, however. This means my groups can do most of their discussion in advance, I can read over their contributions and assign participation credit, and in class they should only need a few minutes together before presenting orally.
Blackboard also has built-in blogs and wikis. I don't see myself using these for my fall courses, but if I get to teach Czech Modernism in the spring, I think I'll have the students create a wiki. The Czech Modernism course would probably be done as one of our upper-division courses that stresses learning to write research papers, and as there are far fewer resources on Czech modernism than on something like Impressionism, having the students incrementally put their findings on a wiki throughout the semester would not only document the progress of their paper research for me, but would strengthen the entire class's knowledge of the topic because they would be building a group resource with citations to their sources. A student preparing a paper on the architect Otakar Novotný would benefit from sources located by a student working on Jan Kotěra, and vice versa. Each student would do his or her own project, yet benefit from the entire group's research.

Kotěra and Tram Design

After a long day of mostly working on presentations relating to a course in American Art that I expect to teach before long, I think a little more Jan Kotěra design is called for. Not only did Kotěra make his name as a pioneering modernist architect, but he designed a number of rail and tram cars. Those that follow were all designed for the Prague Transit Company.

Luxury four-axle car no. 200, 1899

Two-axle car from 1904-5

Two-axle car no. 193, from 1906

I might note that Kristen tells me that not only are there people who would like to reinstate tram service (streetcars) in Pittsburgh, but that generally speaking, the old rails are still in place and just covered with asphalt. I'm all in favor of bringing back America's streetcars, and I say the sooner the better. And of course putting in more subways.

Sitemeter and the Globalized Online World

Sitemeter and other methods we use for tracking visits to websites tell webmasters (or bloggers) an odd collection of facts about the people who come to our sites. Some of it is useful, some not. I, for instance, don't really care that much what the screen resolution is for my readers, but for another type of site that might be vital data. Nor do I care that much whether they use Mac or PC, except in the rare cases where this information actually tells me who visited (my parents and one of my friends use the same provider, but my parents have a PC and my friend a Mac, so I always know which is which).
But I'm seldom identifying actual people, as usually that's impossible and for the most part would be somewhat of a breach of privacy. Rather, I'm always intrigued which pages are popular, a thing which generally has little to do with whether they are among my better posts. Sometimes it becomes clear that a given search engine ranks my offering highly; why else would Japanese web-surfers flock to read my brief remarks on Baden-Powell, or those from Korea be the most interested in my discussion of the EAC software?
It's also fun seeing which countries are represented. This does, of course, give one a sense of where people have the most computers and, to a lesser degree, are able to read English or Czech. The European countries are well represented, but Russia and India are pretty much the only continental Asian countries until the very far east, when Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia pop up. (One of my colleagues tells me that when she was in China, the only way she could access this blog was via our university remote access.) Australia shows up regularly, though pretty much only from servers in Sydney and Melbourne (never anything in Canberra or Townsville, and certainly not anything in the heart of the country). The African continent is mainly represented by South Africa, and the Middle East is pretty much absent. South America is not much to be found, though occasionally I get a visitor from Brazil or Argentina. Mexico is a rarity.
Another thing that can be interesting (we'll leave out the sometimes strange phrasing of search terms) is a sort of evidence of panglobalism. I guess the most striking recent example of that was someone on a German internet provider whose computer was set to Chinese, who searched using the American version of Google and typed in a book title in Czech.
I have to say I was very impressed at that.
Will that kind of linguistic and spatial cosmopolitanism be the norm in a couple of generations, or was my visitor "just" a Chinese grad student studying Czech history in Germany?

Computer Shopping Is Annoying

Now that Spring Break is here, I've had a little time to ponder the inevitable new laptop. The one I have has continued to be (somewhat) usable, but the screen can be pretty hard to read and randomly changes color and brightness. Another user informs me that in his/her case, this proved to be due to motherboard failure. Well, that was hardly what I wanted to hear. My last laptop died of motherboard problems, only in that case they masqueraded as hard drive trouble. I really don't claim to understand anything about motherboards except that they don't seem to be replaceable on laptops.
After a good deal of hunting around and reading of reviews and suchlike, I decided that the Lenovo X61t sounded like just the thing. It has excellent reviews and people describe it as both light and sturdy. To be sure, there were difficult decisions to make: Vista or XP Tablet; an external CD/DVD drive, or the "unibase" that allows you to pop in CD/DVD drive, second hard drive, second battery, blah blah blah. The fact that I do have a second hard drive inclined me toward the unibase, although come to think of it I don't know what size hard drive it fits, only that it's a SATA connection and I'll have to look up whether my second hard drive is SATA or PATA. (I knew when I bought it, but my memory has only recorded the pondering of SATA versus PATA, not the result.)
Part of what led me to the Lenovo was the fact that I can get a significant student discount. My attempts to order the thing online, however, have been a complete failure. Never mind a few small problems, the main thing seems to be that Lenovo objects to shipping to an address different than the billing address.
Well, I can understand their caution, but then why can't I change the shipping address to match the billing address? Every time I try to do this, the whole thing stops dead. This is ridiculous. What if my billing address were a P.O. Box? No one ships to a P.O. Box. What if I lived in a notoriously insecure building? Fortunately, we have pretty good package handling here, barring one incident in which the package never showed up.
I suppose I will have to call in the morning and complete the order by phone. I really just wanted to get the whole thing over with so that they can start building the thing and ship it out.

Counting Down

I took the laptop in to the tech people Monday morning, and it was duly diagnosed with a hardware failure. Our tech people don't work on hardware. The technician assured me that my data was in no danger and given that I was hoping to turn in my dissertation on Friday, suggested that I simply hook the laptop up to an external monitor for the next few days.
Of course, a person doesn't exactly lug an external monitor around. Not even the new flat-screen kind. The desk upon which my external monitor sits has no room for sheets of paper, let alone a laptop. In other words, the desk I set up so optimistically in the fall hasn't proved very useful for much beyond a little web surfing and greeting of fellow bloggers.
I went into a period of mild meltdown. Where was I going to work? How was I going to get anything done? (It was, however, only a mild meltdown. Even though Kristen claims it is about the worst she's seen me get, I can melt down much, much further. There just isn't much about grad school that prompts me that way, so it has been a good many years since I really lost it for any length of time.)
Laptop or no laptop, I figured that no matter what my mental state, I could make a little headway on my illustrations, which I had printed out the night before. I imbibed some soup and settled down to my task and got quite a bit done, despite an (otherwise pleasant) encounter with our gamelan leader in which he assured me that it's cheaper to get a new laptop than to fix an ailing screen.
Later in the afternoon, it occurred to me that just because the screen was preparing to die on me, it was not actually dead yet. I might actually get a few more hours' use out of it. And indeed I got several hours of work out of it that very evening. Consequently, I'm now regarding it as something that is a tiresome problem but not likely to explode or something in the next couple of days.
My advisor, meanwhile, was very sympathetic about this kink in the dissertation process. We have agreed that I will get done what I can, when I can, and depending on when that is, I'll either graduate this spring or next year. She reiterated that my CAA paper had been a success, and that I had even kept to my time limit, unlike some people. I will not recount the horrible tale she told about a certain panel that I did not attend, which involved someone who had no concept of the importance of adhering to one's time limit. My readers can imagine for themselves the possible dire consequences, although I will say it didn't sound as though any fruit was thrown; I'm not sure anyone had any fruit handy. I am glad to say that, in contrast, everyone on my panel behaved very professionally. (I am slightly sorry I missed the debacle of which she spoke, as many horrible things went wrong throughout, but I was enjoying a perfectly good panel in another room.)
In any case, it is still conceivable that I might manage to turn in the first half of the dissertation on Friday and the second half on Monday or Tuesday. Thus, in the throes of optimism, I settled down to work quite early this morning and went at it for four or five hours experiencing that peculiar elation that assures me that I am still madly in love with the dissertation. I realize it is abnormal, but there is nothing quite like settling in at an engrossing project and feeling (no matter how erroneously) that time is of no account and that nothing else could possible drag one away from the whole thing.
Of course, at a certain point I realized that I needed to print out my chapter, that I was hungry, and that the women's restroom at Kiva Han was out of order. I prepared to depart, only to discover my friend Chip reading a strangely untoward-looking tome at a nearby table. In other words, it had nothing to do with Russian avant-garde theater. It looked suspiciously like a social science text of the most impenetrable sort.
Chip confessed it was for a pedagogy course, and made clear that he would rather talk to me (even about my recent haircut) than read any more of it just then.
An hour or so later, we had established that he should learn Uzbek before improving his German, that my roommates are much easier to pet than his, that it would be a stretch for him to claim to be "diverse" on the grounds of being politically left of center (although if he had multiple personalities, I think he could claim to be, euphemistically, "diverse" provided some of the personalities weren't straight white males), and, finally, that neither of us actually believes any of our students dream about us in the form of dreams about rats and that neither do we care if they do, even if it is psychologically damaging to them to dream that we are rats. We enjoyed contemplating the paradox of pedagogical theories that we may in one respect quite agree with and in some other respect regard as utterly mistaken.
In contemplating whether he could avoid going to class, where his roommates would be sure to mention that he had seemed perfectly healthy at breakfast, I proffered the advice that rather than weakly disagree with some minor aspect of the day's topic, and raise suspicions of moral laxity, it would be far better to foment revolution and propose a diametrically opposed approach to teaching, which at the end of class could be revealed as a mere devil's advocate position.
In other words, rather than meekly agree that it is important to maintain firm boundaries between teacher and student, which must never be crossed, it would be much more stimulating to argue that there should be no boundaries whatsoever between the two. Learning is continuous! Everything the teacher does or says is potentially a model for the student! Students should be encouraged to be with their instructors 24 hours a day, following them in and out of the shower, imprinting like Konrad Lorenz's geese. To adapt a phrase current in my father's day, we must teach The Whole Student (it used to be The Whole Child, but college students are usually past childhood)! Attractions between student and teacher should be encouraged; think of Heloise and Abelard! (Well, minus the castration episode.) While Jane Gallop did run into a bit of trouble kissing grad students, this hasn't impaired her career and we suppose that if nothing else her grad students have improved their kissing skills. Chip's students could learn to dress with the same elegant abandon that he does, strewing buttons effortlessly in the street and appearing at meetings in the striking equivalent of his talismanic holey sweater.
Ah, the value of taking a break from one's dissertation! I was much refreshed despite having eaten no lunch. I marched off to print the chapter, devour a burrito or other substantial feast, and get another couple of hours' work in before gamelan.
The gods do, however, smite those who enjoy life too freely. It took an hour and a half to get my printout, gobble down a couple of bagels, and race to gamelan. And while my voice was in good shape to tackle "Mandi madu," the brain began short-circuiting on every piece in our slendro repertoire. There is probably some special torment in hell awaiting incompetent saron players.
My roommates do, however, believe that my needs are best served by spending the evening petting them rather than trying to eke out a few more lines of the introduction. They are probably right. Rabbit massage is healthful for everyone concerned.

Reporting from CAA

I have reached the architecturally unexpected city of Dallas and am trying to get myself into full College Art Association mode. I've always enjoyed CAA in the past, but this year it's more of an effort. It is kind of difficult to enjoy much of anything to the full a week and a half before one hopes to turn in a PhD dissertation.
I had hoped (not expected, but hoped) to get a lot done on the plane. Well, my plane's engine was perhaps the noisiest I have ever encountered, which certainly put an interesting complexion onto the inflight magazine's boasts of having drastically cut noise pollution over the years. One can only wonder how loud the engines were before and if permanent hearing damage resulted for passengers who had no earplugs. Anyhow, I did finally crank up the ipod and looked over a chapter.
Originally I had hoped to room with one or more friends, but very few people I know seemed to be going, and they all seemed to have roommates already. I thus decided against the conference hotel, as even at the student discount rate, it was a bit exorbitant. I located a cheap hotel a kilometer or so away.
Well, there was no record of my reservation, but this got resolved. Next, it took several attempts for the desk crew to get my electronic room key set so it would actually open the door. Also, the first elevator I got into was out of order. I was beginning to feel unhappy. However, the room looked fine once I got inside, although other people have pointed out that we don't have wifi in the rooms and that they have wasps instead. (Later on I realized that my room faces a busy freeway, which provides ambient sound 24 hours a day.)
But... my hotel is populated by other budget-conscious conference-goers, which is kind of nice.
On Tuesday night, those of us on the job market had the opportunity to attend a sort of orientation, so I went. It was pleasant enough, but not as useful as I would have liked (I do not need to be told to check in the mirror for dandruff before going to a job interview). The questions asked by some of the audience members did indicate, however, that many people have not been as well prepared for job interviews as those who come out of my department. So, not for the first time, I will offer up my general praise for My Splendid Department, which does most things right as far as I can tell (and usually tries to fix its mistakes). Even had I not done the mock interview last week, I think I would have felt better prepared than some people seemed to be.
Today I have attended a couple of panels - one on Etruscan art and one on Japonisme. After all, when else do I get a chance to go to hear about things that have little to do with my own research? Both panels were satisfactorily interesting. I have always been intrigued by the Etruscans, and the Japonisme panel looked at things like how Japanese artists reacted to European and American japonisme.
In the meantime, however, my laptop screen developed a strange ailment that was not resolved by downloading an updated driver. Namely, while it is legible, it has taken on a sort of odd pinstriped effect that makes text look blurry. I don't know what its problem is or how to solve it, especially since I can really only get internet access when running on battery in one or the other hotel lobby. I think this means I will not want to give my presentation using my own computer, for fear that the display problem will repeat on the projector. It is most irksome and I hope it will not call for some sort of repair.
But, returning to the positive, I have run across several people from my MA program and was able to have a leisurely chat with our slide librarian (not that she deals with slides anymore). I worked in the slide library for two years and have to say that Kathe always provided one of the most pleasant working environments I can remember. Everyone wanted to hang out in the slide library, and I imagine that this is still the case in the new building.
However, work does need to continue on the dissertation, so I suppose I will close up the laptop and wend my way back to my freeway-oriented lair to see what I can get done before anyone else I know arrives and manifests themselves to me.

The World of Slide Scanners

I had earlier revealed that we had plans to get my parents a slide scanner. My parents have thousands of slides and my mother had surprised me by expressing a desire to scan them for posterity.
Now, it is true that Kodachrome slides have a pretty good estimated lifespan (we have some Ektachrome as well that are horribly faded), but only one person can inherit the things, and I daresay that at least some of them will be of interest to the extended family, although I don't suppose our cousins will want to see every Gasthaus we lodged in back in 1961 or something.
My parents do not have any special need for other types of scanning, as I usually bring my portable flatbed when I visit and we have gotten a great many old family photos digitized with that. Relatives can even get copies of photos of Grandpa in his casket, should they so desire (somewhat unlikely, I think).
The question, then, was which of the small selection of dedicated consumer-end film-and-slide scanners ought to get our frugal dollar. The things are not all that cheap, and generally a person doesn't want to go to the lowest end of the line on photographic-type equipment. To some extent you do get what you pay for, although in digital photography the item you pay for today tends to be superseded tomorrow. (BUT I have read that my digital camera, which I bought about six years ago, still has a better lens than most of its successors. I paid a lot and I got something I've been pretty happy with.)
The slide scanner in my department is a Nikon Coolscan of some sort. I haven't used it all that much and my impression was that it is hard to judge any piece of such equipment used by twenty or so people because you can't upgrade its software (I am not a network administrator, so my attempts to do so were doomed from the start) and you don't really dare fiddle with the settings for fear of messing up what everyone else is used to. We also didn't have a manual lying around the lab.
I found, however, that the Nikon Coolscan is still a major contender in the under-$1000 range. You can get one for about $550, and while that was more than anyone wanted to spend, I thought we might want to go ahead and then sell the thing when it had served its purpose.
My Sibling was, as usual, very skeptical about spending that much, and suggested that although we are particular about visual quality, it might be a higher-end product than we really needed or would benefit from. We are picky about quality, but we are not professional photographers, after all. He was also concerned that the software might be troublesome for us to get set up for my mother to use. She is a person who is very finicky about how something is hung on the wall, and about paint color and so forth, and she is very detail-oriented, but she is not a person who likes fiddling with equipment or software settings. We wanted something we could set up for her that would work with most slides, show her how to use it, and not have to think much more about it.
We then turned our attention to Plustek's OpticFilm line. I had seen a few mostly positive user comments, but these are hard to evaluate because users have generally only had experience with one model.
We were able to find some very detailed and intelligent reviews of the 7200i line that shortly convinced us that this was the direction for us. The 7200i is generally celebrated as a great item that provides the kind of quality you would expect in a machine costing twice as much. It is also, apparently, the highest-res film scanner on the market, or at least under some ungodly sum of money... it can scan at 7200 dpi (2400 dpi is the minimum for scanning slides). At 7200 dpi you can turn your scanned slide into a poster! We didn't think we were likely to want to do that, but it sounded as though there are still benefits to having such a high potential resolution.
About the only major complaint the reviewers had about the 7200i was that the dynamic range is not all that great. This means that in a photo with extremes of dark and light, some of the detail will be lost in the extremes. We didn't like that, but the reviewers confessed that this is unlikely to be a big issue on most slides. One person said he ran into it on about one in a hundred, and another on about one in twenty. We probably don't have many slides with such extremes, as the slides were generally shot in daylight without flash.
We were a bit baffled by the variants of the 7200 line and why some cost a lot more than others. After an hour or two of research, we got clear on the matter.
First, the 7200i, in contrast with the cheaper 7200, has infrared correction for scratches and such. This is supposed to be an excellent thing. We hope that our slides don't really have much dirt or many scratches, as they have had pretty good care and live in boxes when not being shown in our antique projector, but you never know. I found that photos in our albums looked all right in the album but when scanned proved to have all kinds of ugly dust particles.
The difference between the 7200i and the 7200iSE is not in the scanner itself, but in the Silverfast software that comes with it. The 7200i comes with Silverfast AI and the 7200iSE comes with Silverfast SE. We had to go to the Silverfast website to get a sense of what the difference between these was (AI has many more features than SE). We still, even after scrutinizing a comparison chart, weren't sure whether the AI had anything we were likely to use or need. When we saw that AI would output CYMK and RGB while SE only outputs RBG, we thought perhaps we wanted AI, but after reading up on CYMK and RGB, we learned that CYMK is only needed for four-color printing, while photo printing (inkjets and so on) use RGB. This was a surprise, but it caused us to decide that the cheaper SE would be just fine.
We were annoyed to find that the 7200iSE was out of stock nearly everywhere, but after sufficient searching we found a vendor and ordered one.
With luck the slide scanner will arrive before the new computer and we'll be able to try it out using my laptop before we get embroiled in setting up the new computer.
Reviews we read:
Michael Carr at About.com
Gary Wolstenholme at Ephotozine
David B. Brooks at Shutterbug

Computer Gurus?

As usually happens when I visit my parents, their computer is ready for maintenance and has either developed or is in the process of developing some sort of weird problem.
Of course, this time is no exception. We were blithely planning to get a slide scanner and an external hard drive so that my mother could embark on digitizing and properly labeling our trove of slides (most of them are in pretty good shape but the Ektachromes have faded and are prime candidates for adventures in Photoshop).
It was right about when I was in the process of trying to decide just which slide scanner to order that my mother exclaimed that an alarming message had flashed onto her screen.
And lo, the machine wanted to install Internet Explorer 7 but had discovered that the hard drive was almost full!
I was not happy. I told it to cancel installation, but apparently the update had already downloaded itself, as I suppose we had set Windows to do automatic updates to spare My Sibling and I from having to spend hours updating Windows every time we visit. Apparently there remained only 383MB free on the 10GB drive (which I had tried to exchange for a 30GB drive awhile back only to be stymied by HP's having made a nearly impenetrable body for the thing).
My parents do not keep very much on this computer. They are your classic low-tech users who basically write some documents, send and receive a few emails, look at a limited number of web sites, and do taxes. They offered to delete documents and emails, and I said no. I got rid of a few unnecessary programs we had somehow missed in the past, but hesitated to uninstall the dictionary. I ran the antivirus software and looked for spyware. I halved the size of System Restore. And so on. I got the free space up to 6%, which strikes me as dreadfully low on a hard drive this size.
We are rather reluctant to replace a machine that does function, considering that their needs are so modest. On the other hand, it would be really nice if we could go ahead and get the slide scanner (its software would have to go somewhere), and it would be nice to stop messing with irritating things like whether the hard drive is large enough for Windows XP or the maxed-out memory is enough to make it run at a reasonable speed. Perhaps, now that flat-screen monitors are affordable, a low-end desktop computer would be a reasonable solution. (The laptop and printer live on an old typing table and my parents are loath to allot any more space to them.)
I invite comments from the technically aware, and of course if anyone has a recommendation on a dedicated slide/film scanner (Nikon or Plustek???) I would be deeply interested.

Texting Explained

In Prague, I almost never talked on my cell phone. There was seldom any reason to. I had my phone set to vibrate, and most people SMS'd me, which I could then answer silently and at my leisure. A very nice way of making plans anywhere, anytime.
When I decided to go ahead and get a cell phone in the US as well, I assumed that this fine system would continue.
Alas, while most people under 60 now do seem to have cell phones, they seem to be baffled at the notion of using them differently (less obtrusively) than regular phones. I'd send someone an SMS and find out weeks later that it was received but that they "don't know how to answer" or "don't want to pay to do that."
It was very puzzling, so I was glad to see Danah Boyd explain the history of North American text messaging and compare it to the European model.
As she points out, the cell phone business is run very differently in America than in Europe. In Europe, you normally buy credit as needed and you don't pay for anything incoming, so your friends can contact you whether or not you've used up your credit. In America, you normally have a "plan" that allows some specific amount of voice calling plus (or not plus) other services. Even the pay-as-you-go plans are kind of weird; I've run out of credit on mine because someone called me when I was low on credit. It's not very much fun to have your phone act like a pay phone that's run out of change in mid-conversation.
I'm not too impressed with the American mode. I don't want to pay for anything incoming, and I don't want to have to talk to people when it would be easier and less troublesome on both ends to use SMS. If I want to have a good talk with someone, I'd rather SMS them first to see if it's convenient, not interrupt whatever they might be doing.
I suspect, however, that the American method is designed to let people run up the bill as quickly as possible. Ah, capitalism!

Lower Your Phone Bill! (Yeah, Right...)

This morning while lounging indolently on the couch finishing my coffee (or was I working on the last details of the lecture I was preparing to give to Štěpanka’s class on European Immigration? We’ll say it was the latter), I was roused by a loud knock on the door.
As a rule, no one knocks on my door except, once in a great while, my letter carrier. After all, it is an apartment building and visitors have two locked doors to get to before they reach my doorstep. So I thought it must be a package, although I was not expecting one.
No! It was a nicely dressed woman who wanted to discuss my telephone service!
Since I hadn’t yet paid the latest bill and have a few questions about it, I thought perhaps she was here in regard to that. After all, she was clear that she was here to discuss my land-line.
Still, I was a little skeptical. I was not sure whether she was actually representing Český Telecom. Nothing in her hand seemed to bear its name or emblem. Although I understood a good deal of what she was saying—she emphatically wanted to reduce my phone bill—I don’t really like to conduct complicated and potentially financial discussions in Czech. Thus, I put on a bit of a dumb foreigner act and said that I wasn’t sure I understood since I only speak a little Czech. Perhaps unwisely, I had already stated that the phone wasn’t in my name, that Sandra is not my daughter, and that I don’t know her birthdate. (People don’t usually expect me to have adult children, but I was dressed in a more mature manner than usual in preparation for lecturing to a university class. Once in awhile I apparently look my age.)
My visitor was not fazed by my claim not to speak much Czech, but informed me that she would speak slowly. I would not say that she spoke exceptionally slowly, but she did enunciate well.
After much more about phone service than I could possibly absorb, my visitor seemed to think it was time to start writing up an order form. By this time, I was quite dubious that she had any relationship with Český Telecom; presumably she was in the employ of a competitor, although I had thought Český Telecom had no competition on land lines.
While it had not done any good to say that the phone wasn’t in my name or that I didn’t speak much Czech, when I finally stated “Ale, nesmím změnit servis!” (But I’m not allowed to change the service)—even though it would have been more correct to say “služba” than “servis”—she suddenly got the picture, crossed out her form decisively, thanked me, and said goodbye.
Perhaps “nesmím změnit služba” has the same convenient effect here as “Please take me off your list” does for American telephone solicitors. I will have to remember this. (And find out whether the verb smět takes the nominative, accusative, or some other case.)

Telephones, Yet Again

I am coming to the conclusion that it is just not possible to make sense of anything relating to telephones in the Czech Republic.
First off, one should never spend more than five minutes talking on a cell phone unless it is an international call, because at least the international rate that I get is not wholly outrageous. I suspect it is cheaper to call the US than to call within the Czech Republic, even though I have a Czech number. Fortunately, I can send countless text messages, which are ideal in most situations.
Second, while Skype is free, Skype-Out rates (to call people who don’t have Skype on their computers) vary by country and type of phone called. It did not take long to discover that the Skype-Out rate to call Czech mobile phones cannot possibly be any improvement upon calling them from my own mobile phone. It is, in fact, 21¢ American per minute, versus slightly more than 2¢ to call the continental US! The 10-euro credit one has just bought is gone in a flash. Yes, I could be calling loads of friends, family, and my whole writing group for less than it costs to call anyone in the Czech Republic. I could be calling my advisor on a daily basis, assuming this would not cause her to throw her phone down out the window and run screaming from the building.
And third (that’s right, I was making a list), I don’t know what Český Telecom is up to. My ADSL service has been functional for the better part of a month and is supposed to be a flat rate (that is, I could be online 24 hours a day if I wanted), but my latest bill looks pretty much like the last one, which is to say unpleasant and with no mention of the switch in service to ADSL. My one international call shows up as one of the smaller sums. I don’t get it. Something will have to be done. I need my home internet access.
But, on the more positive side, recent attempts to use ordinary free Skype between Prague and Brno have been relatively successful other than some instances of poor sound quality and lag. For free, this is acceptable… Well, maybe. (The connection is most likely to die once the conversation becomes animated.) We do have a weird form of internet connection to deal with on the Brno end, which means that a conversation can use up the battery of the cell phone that provides the connection. --!!-- Is everyone confused enough yet? In order to avoid calling one cell phone in Brno, a second cell phone is used to create an internet connection there. No, I don’t understand how that works either. This kind of thing must be why people make jokes about Brno.

Lying with Statistics After All

I said I didn’t know how to lie with statistics, but Dirk has inadvertently shown me that actual intent is not required. After taking a look at mine (you can do the same by clicking on the Site Meter icon at the bottom of the page), he remarked “I also thought that it was interesting that though Macs have a little less than 3% of the market in the US, 11% of your visitors used them.” That’s skewed because Kristen and Dirk both have Macs and they are repeat visitors. The Firefox stats are also abnormally high because that’s what Jesse uses. (Although I'm on some email lists where you would think that almost everyone uses Firefox.)
On the other hand, that sort of statistic exists for webmasters who want to see whether they are going to ruin their audience’s viewing experience by inserting code that’s too advanced for their browser, or only works at a particular screen resolution. So for that kind of calculation, it doesn’t matter whether the visitors are repeats, what counts is that they are spending time at the site.
My statistics also aren’t always accurate about location. It’s not surprising that someone in Berkeley shows up as being in Oakland (which is next door), or that a company’s computer makes it look like employees were sitting at its headquarters across the country, but I haven’t figured out why my parents are shown as being in Atlanta. I don’t know if they have ever even been to Atlanta.
The country statistics are more reliable, I think. The US shows as providing about 60% of site visitors, give or take a few points depending on the day you look. The Netherlands are currently ahead of Russia and the Czech Republic (which are represented mainly by Kristen and Jesse). Canada and the UK always provide a respectable trickle of visitors. Japan, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Brazil are currently on the graph but there have also been visitors from Australia and Denmark. I still find it amazing that people I don’t know come to this site, but quite a few come using the Next Blog feature, which is entirely random and can take you to anything from a politician’s campaign blog to a student’s grumbles about bad homework grades to photos of the local exhibitionist. (Or, of course, something you might actually want to read.) There is freedom of the press in blogland, at least for now.

Fun with Statistics

Now that the statistical part of the blog has been functioning for an entire week, I thought I would compile some counts.
Thirty-three visits were made by people who apparently already had the URL bookmarked and went straight there. (Wow! But that does include visits by Kristen, Jesse, and my brother, all of whom I can identify individually as regular visitors.)
Twenty-two visits were by people coming directly from the Moskovskie Melochi blog.
Five visits occurred as a result of search engines.
Three came from people looking at my Blogspot profile, and three from people on random blogs that have no link here (that is, presumably the person clicked on Next Blog).
Two visits came via the Nuda v Brně blog (when I look at Jesse’s stats I see that there is more motion in the other direction, with five of you having gone there from here since Monday).
One came from an email that was read on the Web (no, I can’t read your mail, I just know that’s what it was)
Most of you look at the main page rather than at archived pages.
There continues to be international interest: two visitors today are situated in England.
Some things remain a mystery, however. For example, I know that my parents read this blog, but they certainly don’t seem to be showing up on the statistics. Perhaps their laptop is inadvertently set to indicate that they are in Atlanta, Georgia, as there seems to be a lot of interest in this blog there. Most of the people I expected to be reading the blog live in California, but only two cities in California have shown up: Palo Alto and Hayward. Well, I guess maybe my friends in California are keeping in touch psychically rather than by reading what I am writing for them. The vast majority of locations shown are east of the Mississippi (even if only so far east as St. Paul and Peoria).
I know it's possible to lie with statistics, but as I am a moron about statistics, I doubt I know how to do that.

Tracking the Site

Last week I took the bold step of installing a site tracker. I have mixed feelings about keeping tabs on who reads the blog, but rest assured that most of you are really quite anonymous. This is to say that I am sure, for example, that Kristen is my only reader in Moscow thus far. My reader(s) at University of Pittsburgh are not individually identifiable even though I suspect they are all in the History of Art and Architecture.
What I have learned in the several days the thing has been installed is that a surprising number of complete strangers do find their way to this blog. One of them, it is true, found the site by searching on the words “Calypso laundry machines.” I don’t suppose that reader found what s/he was looking for, but perhaps he or she obtained some enjoyment all the same. The reader who sought “film as meditation” is more likely to have found something of use, although you never know.
While a fair number of people have come to the blog from Kristen’s link and a few from Jesse’s (welcome and I hope you find it equally interesting), most of you are not shown as coming from a separate page, but rather have gone directly to my URL.
This is intriguing. Does this mean that random clicks on “next blog” show up the same as if you had bookmarked the site? Or does this mean that I have already built up a surprisingly international audience of what must be repeat visitors? (Readers have arrived from Australia, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands as well as the US and the Czech Republic.)
I really hadn’t imagined that very many unknown visitors would be finding their way here, but since you are apparently doing so, I am delighted and hope that you are enjoying my observations about Prague, surrealism, and other matters.
Finally, if you like this blog, I feel certain you will also enjoy those of Kristen, Jesse, Diane and Greg, and Geoff (see links at right). Their observations are also idiosyncratic, well written, and copiously illustrated.

Why I Don’t Yet Skype

Skype is a technology well known among the recently well-traveled, but which does not seem to be making much headway among stay-at-home Americans. In brief, if one has Skype—which is free to download—one can make free calls to other Skype users, merely by getting on the internet and plugging in a headset. In other words, you can call anywhere in the world for the price of a local call.
The difficulty seems to lie in getting people on the other end to get with the program. True, we can pay the Skype people a little to call ordinary telephones, but why would we want to do that when Skype-to-Skype is free?
Several people have assured me that Skype works splendidly and that they use it all the time to call husbands in Italy or friends in the US, but I have yet to experience this (though in part because I only recently received the password for my new cheap internet service). Weeks ago, when Jesse got internet access, we decided to test our Skype skills, as presumably this would be easier between Prague and Brno (same time zone) than transatlantically. We plugged in our headsets. We went online. The connection was made. … and then it broke off. And was made… and broken off. After about twenty minutes of this, we decided that there were some technical difficulties on the Brno end. As far as we can tell, these relate to the type of internet connection there, which is a little unstable.
It seems clear that I can use Skype from my apartment, but since everyone I know who has it is nearby, I have not yet experienced a Skype call that lasted more than two minutes, and if that’s all that a call is going to last, there is not much reason to use Skype. Skype is for leisurely conversation, not “Hi, I’ll be over in half an hour.”
So if you register on Skype, let me know or I probably won’t call.

A Comment on Comments

I've noticed that the only people thus far who have left comments are those who also have blogs. While this might have led me to believe that only about three people have ever taken a look, emails from the rest of you tell me otherwise, and that some of you are baffled by the protocol for creating comments.
Naturally, it is up to you as to whether you wish to read blogs in anonymous silence, make your comments privately in email to me (assuming that you know me and have my email address, which will be most of you), or make public comments attached to the individual essays.
But, if you have been contemplating the Comment function and were not really sure how to go about it, this is how. First, click on the Comment icon at the bottom of the piece you were reading. (If there are already comments, you can read those and have the option to add your own. Otherwise, it is purely add-your-own.) Type in your message. You will then observe that you can be Blogger, Other, or Anonymous. For some reason Blogger assumes you have a blog and are thus a Blogger. However, most of you are not in that category, so simply choose Other or Anonymous. "Other" has a place for you to insert your name and (if you have one) URL. "Anonymous" assumes that you wish to be utterly anonymous, which seems silly (I think I can disable Anonymous if I choose), but you could always sign within the message. The next step is to type in the funny-looking letters shown further down the page. This rather annoying step is to prove you are human, or at least sentient and able to type, rather than some sort of spamming device. Finally, you tell it to publish. There, you have added your wisdom (or observations, or disagreement, or what-have-you).
In theory a blog is a collective activity, and I've actually read discussion of the copyright issues of such collaborative effort, but my small experience of blogs is that in most instances the collaborative aspect is a rather minuscule part of the whole. Being a writer by trade (when not in my grad student mode), I assert my own copyright to what I post here, but let's be realistic here, this blog is for our mutual entertainment, it's not some sort of corporate feedback structure where whatever you say can be held against you.
So, I welcome your remarks and encourage the non-bloggers to add some.
And, if any of you know how to get Eudora to send outgoing Compuserve email via Český Telecom's smtp.iol.cz server, do let me know, because evidently it is more complex a setup than what I did to get it to send via Bohemia Bagel's smtp.bohemiabagel.cz server.
(And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...)

Nezval--No, Wi-Fi and ADSL Internet

I was going to say a bit about Nezval today. But instead, it appears it’s time for an update on my internet situation. Sandra did promptly order high-speed internet for me, and Český Telecom actually did install it pretty quickly (I could tell because the new ADSL modem told me the line was live), but since Český Telecom failed to let me know my user name and password, I could not actually USE the new service. Fortunately, at that point I had just downloaded a new wi-fi driver and was magically (after almost two months) able to use the Národní knihovna connection to do things like work on online grant proposals and upload the blog and examine library catalogs. Well, today while at the library attempting to re-send my advisor various proposal pieces she had requested, the wi-fi promptly went dead. I have no idea whether it went dead for the entire library or whether somehow the library knew I was hogging its bandwidth for the moment. (It went dead on me in the Main Hall. After about half an hour I went to the Reference Room, which then also went dead on me as I typed the email on Mail2Web.) Frustrated, I went home and discovered that Sandra had succeeded in extracting the user name and password from Český Telecom. Hey! Service! But of course now I can’t figure out what the outgoing SMTP is in order to send outgoing email, so for now that will mostly have to go the old, expensive way. I did log onto the email site that Český Telecom provides for me and found that it had sent me an email with the user name and password. Right, you have to know these in order to find out what they are. That’s really brilliant. No wonder Český Telecom lost market share to cell phone companies. At this point I have too much of a headache to deal with the multiple emails I have received from my advisor in the past three hours, each suggesting a small change to the final Chester Dale proposal. It will have to happen in the morning, when I had hoped to make an early start at the archive for once. And, of course, one of my transcripts still hasn't shown up two days before it is due. Well, yes, I should have ordered it over the summer, but when one has seven schools to deal with, one or two always get forgotten.

The Good

First, I must salute Sandra and her mother out in Toronto: when I asked what I should do about getting cheaper internet here, and mentioned the Český Telecom offer, they boldly called the company and asked about it. Next thing I knew, they had signed me up for it and all I have to do is get the ADSL modem. This is even though Sandra doesn’t think she will want to keep the service once I leave. I have never rented an apartment from anyone so efficient in my life. I can see why her employer here let her take a leave of absence; they are anxious not to lose her.
Second, I see that Kristen has felt the need to point out that her comments about Moscow should not be taken as an extended complaint about the city or about Russia in general, but merely as a description of what she encounters and how life there is different from life in Pittsburgh. She does, after all, like Moscow and Russia.
Let me state that while I, too, enjoy complaining (and have been assured that it is a suitably Czech thing to do), I am actually quite happy here. The irritations of daily life are not worse than those I experience at home, merely different. Prague is one of my favorite places to live. It is, just as all the guidebooks say, an extraordinarily beautiful place (at least, now that not all the buildings are obscured by soot). It has stunning buildings and gorgeous trees. The food is excellent (if you like Czech and Italian cuisine, which I do). The transit system is extremely efficient, if sometimes overcrowded. Violent crime is nearly nonexistent, and people roam the streets freely until somewhat after the night trams start, at which point it is safe but not much fun to try to get home. The populace is generally good-tempered in public, and someone or other on the tram will always get up for the less-mobile, assist in pulling a baby carriage on-board, or make an effort to help out a confused tourist. (Of course, those of us who speak some Czech do find that not everyone really knows how to speak slowly when asked, but people will usually repeat themselves, even if at the same rapid pace.)
While some Americans do complain of the restaurant service, thinking it is a relic of communism, it is nothing of the kind. In my experience, under communism waiters did not really see any reason to take orders or bring food, whereas now, they are highly efficient and usually good-natured. They always know when you have finished a drink or a plate of food, and carry off the evidence instantly (if one plans to spear food off a neighbor’s plate, it is best to hang onto the fork); unlike American waitstaff, they do not perpetually inquire (breaking up intimate conversation or causing one to spit up a mouthful of food) whether everything is okay. Generally they total up the bill with great speed, and as a rule they are happy to add up separate checks as this (I am told) means they will probably get more in tips.
It is true that people usually assume that I am Czech until I open my mouth, but this is fine with me. It means that people are always asking if I have any headache pills, if they can borrow my pen for a moment, if the arriving tram is the sedmička, if the bottle of Becherovka on the grocery shelf is the 750ml or the 1-liter, if the train for the Českomoravská stop comes on the left or the right side of the platform, or even (bizarrely) if I would be interested in buying some perfume on the street. This fits with my observation that, internationally, I seem to be a person whom others automatically assume can guide them. Usually this takes the form of asking for directions; when I was apartment-hunting in Washington, I had the opportunity to tell others how to find various streets, and when I went to Munich for spring break, I was able to advise (albeit in broken German) how to locate the music school. When my friend Cesar visited me in Washington, it became manifestly clear that people regarded me as the one to ask for directions and him as the one to ask to take their picture. Not one person asked him for directions, nor did anyone ask me to take their picture in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I’m not sure what this means, other than that I don’t seem dangerous, but so long as my students don’t all want headache pills or to have me read labels for them, it should be useful in my teaching career.